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Saturday, February 13, 2010

went to a two days business trip (exhausting and the current train situation a bit annoying...),

spent a nice evening with my colleagues (oops, I totally forgot about our Indian style dinner),

in the same night, I helped my neighbor since her husband had a hypoglycemia and required emergency medical services,

then overslept the day after,

tried to support some colleagues with their pilot study (some computer in the network did say goodbye), ...

... and finally I got called by my girlfriend who told me that her computer had been stolen. Oh dear, what's next?

Unfortunately, she requires the notebook computer for her day job, so there wasn't that much time find a suitable replacement. Now, about 24 hours later, we already bought another one, set it up with Ubuntu Linux, and restored most of the data.

Why is that so important that I wanted to tell you in a blog post? The reason is to say "Thank you!" to the people in other open-source projects who do a great job to make others' lifes easier. For example BackupPC - the system that saved (most of) my weekend :-)

BackupPC resides on a little server and scans the computers in the local network. If it detects a known one, it connects via a SSH tunnel and syncs the files to RAID disks. The file history can then be accessed via a web interface which also provides to (usually) easily restore them including access rights. The goood thing is, no one has to worry about doing the backups manually.

So please guys, keep an eye on your data. Usually, one realizes how important it is once it is lost... :-)

Monday, February 8, 2010

The heading seems to be a bit cryptic, isn't it? It is about the "Community Council Face-To-Face Meeting in Hamburg".

We, the Community Council, had the chance to meet each other in the real world. Two days to catch up with all the tiny bits and pieces which are sometimes so incredibly difficult to discuss - mainly via IRC and in parallel with the "competing" usual project work.

The folks at the Hamburg office offered a warm welcome - many thanks to Jürgen and the members of the Team OpenOffice.org e. V. who cared about our creature comforts.

This is how the participants looked like - just a snapshot since we missed any opportunity to posture ...

There were some interesting information and sometimes even strong discussions. Hardly surprising, since each of the council members has a certain viewpoint. As you may know, each of the members is elected by a special constituency, so that the person can represent the interests of a certain group in our whole community.

Besides he official discussion there were - maybe even more important - the lesser official discussions until late in the night. I can just repeat my request to everyone to use any chance to attend such a local meeting or even conference ... :-)

Here is a picture of what happened with the results ... aehm ... the media which was used to collect the results.

You may take the chance to have a look at the draft minutes John was so kind to prepare. Most probably, there will be some more information in the near future. Until then we have some more Action Items which have to be resolved ... let's go!

That's it - many thanks to all the people who were directly and indirectly involved!